Michel Tournier

Michael Worton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317896388
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume of essays brings together critical analysis and commentary on the literary work of Michel Tournier.

Part One

Surveying the work

1 Michel Tournier Being a Novelist*

Between The Wind Spirit (1977) and Le Vol du vampire (The flight of the vampire, 1981), there is a clear shift in Tournier’s attitude towards the reader. In the first text, he explains the genesis of his works and so seems to be determining the ways in which readers will receive them, thereby assuming a position of authority (for two very different responses to the authority of The Wind Spirit, see the essays by Christiane Baroche and Colin Davis in this volume). In the later text, he abdicates not so much his own authority as the notion that the author has sole authority over his texts, insisting crucially that the reader is a co-creator of the text. This essay represents a further step. Written in an anecdotal and often mischievously arrogant style and making much use of irony and parenthetical winks to the alert reader, he offers his conception of how a novelist functions, referring not only to questions of literary genesis or the reader/author/text relationship, but also to such sensitive and potentially explosive areas as the role of the literary critic and the media. Tournier’s autobiographical style is revelatory here, since he concludes by explaining his own drive to go on writing in terms of his hope that some kind of immortality will be afforded to him by future readers.

Vocation

I am often asked how one becomes a writer. The answer that immediately springs to mind is that it all begins with reading. A future writer must always have spent his childhood and adolescence gobbling up shelf after shelf of books. Anyone who has not experienced the craving for reading has no chance of ever becoming a writer. For literary history proves that there has never been such a thing as an ‘amateur’ writer, that is to say someone who has absolutely no knowledge of literature past and present and yet spontaneously produces a great work of art. Literature is born of literature, just as the seeds which fall from a tree germinate only if they fall into the humus formed by the dead leaves and rotting fruits of that same tree. In order to understand how a writer began, it is certainly more telling to discover which books he first admired rather than how he was weaned or how he first fell in love. I would go so far as to suggest that works may engender each other, as ideal and autonomous beings, with authors being no more than the waste matter excreted and left behind by their works as they create themselves. However, I shall not expand here on this idea, since I have developed it elsewhere¹.

Of course, reading is not enough in itself, and many fervent readers never actually go so far as to take up their pens and write themselves. There must be another motivation, one which I shall try to pinpoint.

One sure indication of the beginnings of a vocation is when a child copies into a notebook the pages or passages that they most admire in their favourite books. This is certainly not so that they can learn them by heart, nor is it in order to create some sort of personal anthology. Rather, it is an act of jealousy and attempted appropriation, as if saying: ‘This page is so good, so very much to my way of thinking that I cannot accept that someone else should have written it instead of me. By copying it out, I am making amends for the wrongs done to me, and I am incorporating it into my own body of work …’. I have two such notebooks, the first of which I must have begun in my eleventh year, and I have to admit that when I open these notebooks now, I blush with shame at the poor taste I showed in my choice of material. But there again, don’t I owe some kind of filial gratitude to Georges Ohnet, René Bazin, Victor Cherbuliez and Henri Duvernois for having opened the door of literature to me, even if it was only the back door? In 1981 I had the great honour of being quoted in that year’s edition of the Petit Larousse: high praise indeed! My pleasure and my pride were, however, severely dampened, when I found that the name of Pierre Benoit was one of those who had had to be excluded from this new edition, for the dictionary has so little space for quotations that one name cannot be added without losing another previously included. It seemed to me that Pierre Benoit had been left out in order to make way for Michel Tournier, and I was most saddened by this, for the author of Koenigsmark, L’Atlantide and L’Île verte had nourished and enriched my adolescent years. However, we know from literary history that after his death an author may undergo a temporary eclipse only to return suddenly to favour at some later point; I would be only too delighted if this were to be the case – and soon! – for Pierre Benoit.

I have already had occasion to express my great debt of gratitude to Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgersson.² I was nine years old when I was given the copy of this tale which is still in my possession and which has survived five changes of house, the War, the Occupation, bombings, etc. But the story of the origin of this magical book merits retelling, for it really is most edifying. In 1877 there appeared in France a little educational novel entitled Le tour de la France par deux enfants, written by a certain G. Bruno. G. Bruno was in fact the pseudonym of the wife of the eminent philosophy professor, Alfred Fouillée. This book, which was enormously successful in schools, and had a print run of millions, is a guide to the towns, ports and countryside, industry and culture, châteaux and mountains of a land which the recent defeat of 1871 had made even more precious to its citizens. A copy of this book landed on the desk of Selma Lagerlöf who immediately decided to do the same thing for Sweden. But the author of Gosta Berling was a woman of true genius, and with the best will in the world she could not write the kind of conscientious, well-documented but in literary terms totally worthless work that G. Bruno had produced. Without trying to do so, Lagerlöf created a masterpiece.

This story is a reminder that the surest way of attaining mediocrity is to embark deliberately on the quest for originality. This is the sole aim of all avant-garde movements, and the sole reason why they fail. The real artist seeks only to imitate and if possible to equal his masters. Beethoven aspired only to be as great as Haydn and it was as if unwittingly and in spite of himself that he surpassed him. Selma Lagerlöf was only trying to produce an entertaining and educational work when she undertook Nils Holgersson. A work of art is always a failed imitation.

In addition, both time and experience are essential to novelists, for while child composers and adolescent poets are not unknown, novelists do not mature and produce their best works until later in life.

Experience

Stendhal took part in the Russian campaign of 1812. He saw Moscow burn. He took part in the Great Retreat and lived through the unforgettable crossing of the Beresina. The fruit of all this is only some rather dull pages in his memoirs. But when it came to depicting a Napoleonic battle in the opening pages of La Chartreuse de Parme he chose the battle of Waterloo, which he himself had not actually witnessed. And his description of it is both breathtaking and authoritative.

One can therefore see what a fascinating study can be made of the role played by first-hand experience in the writing of novels. Might not a true novelist best be defined as someone who speaks only of what he does not know?

In French, there is only one word expérience to designate what are really two different sorts of mental openings onto the external world. There is first the normal content of everyday life and the knowledge that stems from it. One can thus say that a man of maturity is a man of experience. The Germans use the term Erfahrung which means, literally, those things acquired in the course of a journey. But expérience also means the calculated causation of a phenomenon in order to study it. In German, the word for this is Experiment. In this sense, one sets up an experiment (une expérience) – one engages in experimentation.

Two studies of this notion of expérience appeared in France within a few years of each other: Claude Bernard’s L’introduction à la médecine expérimentale (1865), and Emile Zola’s Le roman expérimental (1880). Claude Bernard’s essay has become a great classic of epistemology, whereas there is no shouting from the rooftops of the literary world about Zola’s book. Is such a disparity justified? Has the full ambiguity of Claude Bernard’s treatise been fully appreciated? Has there ever been experimentation in medicine in the true sense of the word? Undoubtedly, there was experimentation in the case of the SS doctors in the concentration camps. Apart from this example, which is, thankfully, a truly exceptional one, doctors have very little scope for experimentation. Andreas Vesalius, the celebrated Fleming, was sentenced to death by the Inquisition for having invented human vivisection. But this was a question of anatomy and physiology, not of medicine. Because they touch our very bodies and can hold our life in their hands, we invest the work of doctors with something of the sacred, and this weighs heavily on their sense of responsibility and their fear of making mistakes. When we speak of experience in medicine, we use the term in the sense that the experience of practising medicine for some time has endowed a doctor with a kind of professional intuition when it comes to dealing with his patients. This is one of the most profound forms of wisdom that can be acquired in life (Erfahrung).

Conversely, Zola’s experimentation in the novel represented a wholly new and extremely creative approach to novel-writing. Certainly, the novel cannot do without the Erfahrung type of experience. As I have already said, the difference between the poet or musician and the novelist is that the latter must have seen something of life. Even those novels which are the product of a very young novelist, such as Goethe’s Werther or Raymond Radiguet’s Le diable au corps, focus on the Erfahrung experience of first love. Zola’s ambition was precisely to break out of the narrow confines of the novel as an intimate and personal genre and instead to embrace vast social and contemporary issues. In this sense, one could truly describe him as a novelist who chose a subject outside the scope of his own knowledge. He had to begin with an investigation of places, people and things upon which the proposed novel was to focus. Such a method was initiated by Flaubert in Salammbô and L’éducation sentimentale, but there is no doubt that Zola was the novelist who was the most willing to get his hands dirty, and quite literally so when he was working on Germinal, his novel about coal mines in the north of France. He was followed by a number of other Naturalists, such as Alphonse Daudet, Huysmans and Goncourt.

One might add that the success of a work depends on the extent of personal investment made by the author, since a novel is clearly a work of literature: a work of lyricism and not simply a piece of journalism or sociological documentation. There must be a fusion of the two kinds of experience, for a mere study of the terrain will be lifeless and mechanical if it is not grafted onto a background of personal experience which lends it warmth and colour. In the case of Zola, it is easy to define and explain the weakness of his less successful passages: his writing is weak when his documentation ceases to be irrigated and warmed-through by his own personal experience of life.

A tried and tested method of achieving a happy marriage between Erfahrung and Experiment consists of dealing with a subject which is close to personal experience but is nonetheless deliberately maintained at one remove from it. For example, although she herself never made any public declarations on the subject, it is generally accepted that Marguerite Yourcenar had experience of lesbian relationships – even perhaps that her only love relationships were lesbian ones. And yet her work contains not a single love story between two women. On the other hand, male homosexuality is a theme she has dealt with on several occasions, and with quite extraordinary mastery. Without wishing to compare myself to her, I applied a similar technique when writing The Erl-King. Nazi Germany was one of the most profound experiences (Erfahrung) of my childhood and adolescence. The main character of The Erl-King is a Frenchman who was called up in 1939 and taken prisoner in 1940, and is thus a man appreciably older than myself, since I was too young to enlist at the time of the war. Upon the background of my own Erfahrung of Nazi Germany, I therefore had to graft an entire series of Experiments – journeys, investigations, etc, research into the conditions of prisoners, life inside a Napola, the spectacle of the collapse of the Third Reich, the arrival of the Soviets, and so on. I thus tried to go beyond a simple account of my French prisoner of war (something I myself had never been), and also at the same time endeavoured to lend some personal warmth and colour to the evocation of Nazi Germany and its eventual demise. As for my own Erfahrungen, I have recorded these in two works, The Wind Spirit and Petites proses, neither of which has been particularly appreciated by the public or the critics!

The critics

When you have attained a certain seniority as a writer, you have only to look back on your career in order to realize that relations with the critics go through various stages of development … and sadly, they become less favourable.

First there is the début of the young first-time writer. If one had to pinpoint the precise date of birth of a writer, I think that it would be the day of his first press launch. The book is there on the table. It is the first time that he can see it and touch it. He is like a mother seeing her child for the first time. He sits down and begins to sign copies. Each signature is like the first cry of a newborn baby. ‘I am here, I exist, read me!’ Even more strangely, the cry tends to be answered. There is a delightful tradition in the world of books which ensures that a newcomer is always well received. He enjoys a period of grace which, alas, he finds out all too soon is merely temporary! The atmosphere changes with his second book. If this is a success, and if his reputation and his audience grow stronger with each subsequent work, he will inevitably notice a souring in the critics’ treatment of him, a souring that will gradually transform itself into out and out hostility. It is as if the distinguished gentlemen of the literary press cannot bear to see any star rise without their help or in spite of their hostility, and even perhaps precisely because of the virulent and spiteful attacks which they launched on the writer’s latest book, thereby drawing the public’s attention to the target of their antagonism. Scorned and reviled one week by a magazine critic, a writer cannot but smile gleefully when he sees his novel placed at the top of the best-seller list published the following week by the same magazine.

And yet the fact remains that as one grows in stature, so one becomes a target for abuse. And the bigger the target, the easier it is for shots to hit home. Over the years, Romain Gary came to find such a situation intolerable. His solution was, as everyone now knows, to invent another self, Émile Ajar, a young unknown who wrote in an entirely different vein, with a different style, and whose books had a wonderful freshness about them. And Gary’s delight knew no bounds when he read the hyperbolic praise heaped upon the latest Émile Ajar by those very same critics who poured mocking scorn on the latest Romain Gary. And what is quite extraordinary is that Gary was able to manage these two careers, his own and that of Ajar, at the same time. He himself had certainly not planned or even imagined the momentous success that was to come from his reinvention of himself as someone else – when Ajar was awarded the Prix Goncourt a few years after Gary had won it. It is hard to understand how such success failed to make him happy enough to go on living. If I had been in his place, I’m sure that I would have tried to invent yet another persona in order to win the Prix Goncourt for a third time.

But to return to the qu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART ONE: SURVEYING THE WORK
• PART TWO: SCRUTINIZING THE WORK
• PART THREE: AN INTERVIEW
• Glossary
• Notes on Authors
• Bibliography
• Index